Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain firmware and application software that are either provided by the manufacturers of the electronic devices, by telecommunication carriers, or by third parties. This firmware and application software often contain software bugs. New versions of the firmware and software are periodically released to fix the bugs or to introduce new features, or both. If firmware or firmware components are to be changed in electronic devices, it is often very a complicated and tricky process to update the firmware components
Often, it is difficult to determine what is wrong with a device when a problem is encountered. Additionally, a customer care representative for an operator may not have answers to a customer's device problems and may not be able to fix them. Determination of problems with a customer's electronic device is one of the big problems that operators often encounter. Answering customer care calls can also become quite expensive, especially so if at the end of such a call, the customer care representative is unable to determine what is wrong with the device.
Customer care centers get numerous calls for support from customers, yet they have very few means to determine what is wrong with a device. The Customer Care Representative (CCR), also referred to as a Customer Service Representative (CSR), often asks questions of a customer, but usually does not get proper answers. Customers often do not know what is wrong with their device. As a result, configuration changes that can fix a problem cannot be easily determined, and firmware updates that can fix the problem cannot be identified.
Usually, even when a problem is diagnosed, a solution may not be readily available. Thus, customers who call to report a problem are often left without having the problems with devices solved.
Additionally, an operator may need to update millions of phones to fix a known bug; an activity that can get very expensive and consume a lot of resources. There is no easy way to conduct mass updates of millions of electronic devices.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention.